Back in the Saddle

Welcome back after the summer holidays! Thanks to airbnb and writing advertorials about sofa re-upholstery for a national newspaper, I have been able to carry on my Sex Drive. Emerging from a summer of editing Sex Drive, it is something of a shock to tune back into mainstream culture and hear clangers of sexist, misogynist thought being dropped here, there and everywhere. Casualty last week for instance (I was staying at my parents and watch TV is what they do) one female character says something like, “No! I’m not a prostitute, stop saying that!” as if being a hooker is a bad thing. Also there was a vehement denial from another female character about being “easy.” Sigh. The good news is that Regina Thomashauer at whose workshop I got my tits out in New York last year, has got a new book out called “Pussy” which has hit the New York Times best seller list. It’s at number seven, above a book about the Mitford Sisters which put a spring in my step yesterday.

You’ve probably seen the picture around. I broke the story in August and there have been several follow-up pieces. The Guardian seems to have gone slightly vulva crazy actually, with a new vulva-based web series. And tonight I give a talk about Sex Drive at “high end orgy private members club” Killing Kittens in Portland Place, London. So there you go, we now just need to wait for an enlightened publisher to understand that not everyone wants to spend their Saturday nights watching Strictly Come Dancing. There’s a masturbation joke in there somewhere but it’s a lame pun. The only masturbation joke I ever tell is courtesy of “punk poet,” John Cooper Clark:

A man goes to a doctor for a medical exam.

The doctor says to the man, “I’m sorry but you’re going to have to stop masturbating.”